Swiftype was recently invited by leading marketing resource MarketingProfs to write a post highlighting the three questions organizations should ask themselves as they look to replace Google Site Search (commonly referred to as GSS).  As you likely know, April 1 was the official sunset of GSS and now users are given alternative migration options such as CSE (Google Custom Search Engine) — which will be a pared down version of GSS that features ads.

Kyle Bento of IMPACT provided a great breakdown of GSS alternatives and included this information on what you can expect from CSE.

Google Custom Search seems is very similar to GSS minus a few key features:

• Google Custom Search is Ad-based. That means that you’ll be at the mercy of your competitor’s paid advertising, but embedded right on your site. (There’s one exception: Non-profits.)

• There’s no option to disable Google’s branding. One of the most appealing features of GSS was the ability to remove Google’s branding and seamlessly merge results into your site. Not anymore.

• Query limits are capped daily.  That means if you’re operating a high-volume website, Google Custom Search will stop working once you’ve hit your quota.

• No more email support.  If you have a problem, you’re on your own.

In our article, Swiftype co-founder Matt Riley identified the three questions every org needs to consider as they choose their alternative. As Bento puts it, CSE “is not an ideal solution for professionals.” For those of you looking for a more robust solution, check out Matt’s article here (or hop on over to MarketingProfs and take a read).  

And if you’re a GSS customer and you’re ready to get started with Swiftype, you can fill out this form, and we will be in touch shortly. Alternatively, you can watch our recent webinar and learn how to migrate to Swiftype in four simple steps.

Google Site Search Is Going Has Gone Away: Three Questions to Ask Before You Replace It

Google launched Google Site Search (GSS) in 2008 to offer its technology to online publishers and their websites for searchers to use while on those sites, but the company recently announced that it will sunset GSS, forcing companies to replace its search technology by April 1, 2018.

If you are facing that decision, ask yourself three questions we’ve compiled to help you find a GSS replacement.

1) Do I need a more robust solution?

Website visitors who perform a site search are 216% more likely to convert than visitors who don’t, so it is important to ensure that those users have good experiences throughout their visit.

Furthermore, a search on your website is a strong sign of user intent, and you should be paying close attention to what the searcher is trying to find. What GSS lacks—and many alternatives offer—are customization abilities and powerful site search data and analytics, both of which provide useful ways to give marketing programs a shot of adrenaline.

Why does it matter?

Most brands that want to use content beyond purely informational purposes tend to look for some level of customization, prioritizing content based on relevancy, time, and other factors. User behavioral data is also of huge importance — especially as it relates to search — because it sheds light on what consumers want to know, what they are and aren’t finding useful, or even helping to identify customer service problem areas. Brands like SurveyMonkey have leveraged search data to build better help center content.  Deanna Horton, Senior Content Strategist for SurveyMonkey, told Forbes recently, “Listening to customers is core to who we are as a company. To make impactful data-­driven improvements to self-service content, we listen to our customers by determining what they’re writing to support about and using our findings to inform new content that answers those questions. At the end of the day, you can’t answer someone’s question if you don’t know what their question is.”

According to Horton, “[SurveyMonkey’s] product teams also leverage the data to continually improve the product experience.”

2) Will we actually use it?

New solutions are often implemented with the best of intentions but ultimately don’t get a lot of use. We’ve all done it. We’d all like to never do it again. Given website activity and content are usually highly important, brands can’t afford to let this happen with their site search technology. Be especially aware of the technical requirements a tool requires and how they match with your team’s capabilities to ensure on-going use and effective management. The pressure is on to find the right solution, use it to its full capabilities, and set the brand up to benefit from all the bells and whistles.

GSS was admittedly easy to use — and that may be suitable for some businesses — but I’m willing to bet most brands are in need of something not only more robust but also easy to use.  Alternative solutions offer easy customization and powerful analytics — with some vendors sending weekly data analytics reports that highlight problem areas or notable search trends. When deployed correctly, content management and site search can become very powerful tools for a brand to improve customer experience, content marketing, and brand loyalty.

Why does it matter?

Looking at site content with a critical operational eye ensures improved integration. Doing so will give you a sense of exactly where the solution fits, who will manage it, and clearly mark expectations.   

An added bonus: smart marketing teams will also take the opportunity to figure out how the new solution helps them work smarter and faster. With the right solution — specifically for content management and search tools — brands can build in the right data program from the start; positioning themselves for better use of the tool, improved understanding of the good, the bad and the ugly parts of their website experience, and assessing content value as it relates to other critical web metrics (click through and bounce rates, duration times, page views, etc.).  

3) How will I know it’s working?

New solutions should be judged against their effectiveness and impact on marketing goals. By finding out what metrics can be tied back directly to the new technology, marketing campaigns will be better designed to succeed. During on-boarding, actively work with your solution provider to customize a strategy for success and be clear on what metrics matter to the organization, and ask what additional metrics can be tracked.  E.g. will your conversion rates be higher? Will it accelerate pipeline? Will it save your team time spent on manual work? Will it help your team organize their day and be more productive? Will it create more engagement with customers and prospects?

Why does it matter?

If you’re going to spend the money and time building/buying and implementing a new solution, you need to know what constitutes success. MapBox, a location data platform used by mobile and app developers, and used by the likes of Doordash, Mapquest, Airbnb and Snapchat, used site search technology and data to improve online experiences.

Rafa Gutierrez, Lead Support Engineer at MapBox said, “We want to ensure a streamlined and tailored experience that gives users fast access to relevant documentation so they can make the most of their use of MapBox technology. We dive into our metrics dashboard regularly to look for oddities or patterns that give us insight to how customers are finding the info they need.”

As investment into content creation and digital marketing continue to rise, make your content not only accessible but also reconcile content with marketing’s evolving focus areas. Doing so can generate huge gains towards big-picture marketing and brand goals.

As brands transition from Google Site Search, asking these three questions may guide the decision-making process. You may confirm that you have the right solution, or be compelled to explore your options. Your goal should be to deploy a solution that allows you to inform your audiences, improve the online experience, and engage in meaningful ways.

At your service: Swiftype GSS Migration Specialists
Our GSS Migration Specialists have lots of experience with the GSS migration process (which is really simple) and we make it easy for you to get a search engine up and running by providing a web crawler and API for ingesting data, and an intuitive admin dashboard for managing your search experience.

If you have questions about migrating from GSS to Swiftype or just about site search implementations in general, feel free to email us at [email protected].

Hopefully you are well aware of this by now, but Google Site Search is shutting down on April 1. In case you’re more of a visual person, here’s a screenshot from the GSS website:

If you visit the Google website, you’ll also notice a banner about Google Search Appliance. In the banner, “Google is no longer selling new licenses for the Google Search Appliance (GSA)”.

If you’re using GSA for site search, we can help successfully migrate to a new (easier to manage) solution. More info on that here.

Ode to GSS

GSS has been the trusted site search provider for thousands of companies since it was introduced by Google in 2008. Google Site Search provided businesses with a code-free solution for indexing their website’s content and making it searchable. Search relevancy can be difficult to get right but GSS was powered by the core Google search algorithm and well, that thing works pretty well.

When companies installed GSS on their website, they could be fairly confident that their site search would return relevant and reliable results. Additionally, since Google handles about 63,000 searches per second for its internet-wide search engine it was safe to assume they could handle your website’s search throughput.

Google’s ad-supported replacement for GSS

Google Custom Search is an ad-supported site search solution that Google will continue to offer. What’s nice about Custom Search is that it’s free but that does come at the cost of showing ads in your search results. This unacceptable for most commercial use cases.

Additionally, Custom Search engines are subject to query limits and new pages or content updates can take awhile to be indexed. Here’s a deep dive into the differences between Custom Search and Swiftype and why paying for site search is worth it.

Considerations for Implementing an Adequate GSS Replacement

Not all site search solutions are created equal

Although one site search provider can appear similar to another at first glance, search technology is difficult to get right and vendors can have significant differences in the stability and performance of their underlying search architecture. When considering replacements for your GSS, it’s important to think about a search provider’s track record including their experience handling large scale implementations (millions of documents and millions of queries per month).

For example, here at Swiftype we support over 10K production search engines and serve well over 5 billion queries a month. Our search product is built on Elasticsearch, the popular open source project (over 115 million downloads worldwide), and that infrastructure enables us to scale seamlessly, provide state of the art relevancy, robust analytics and other important features.

Evaluating replacement solutions

Here are 5 key considerations for implementing an adequate GSS replacement.

Migrating to Swiftype Site Search from Google Site Search

Swiftype matches GSS’s ease of use and implementation

Swiftype Site Search matches GSS’s ease of implementation and use but comes with additional features and a modern admin dashboard. Swiftype enables you to index your content via web crawler (very similar process to GSS) or API.

Swiftype Site Search matches GSS’s ease of implementation and use but comes with additional features and a modern admin dashboard.

Customize your search results

By default, our search algorithm will rank your results intelligently, but we also provide you the tooling to fully customize your search results both on an individual query level as well globally across all queries. Once you index your content, you can use the intuitive admin dashboard to customize relevancy by applying weights via slider, reposition results through a drag and drop interface and view search analytics.

Here’s a quick look at our weights feature:

And here’s result repositioning:

Analytics: Find trends in search data

Search analytics are collected automatically and they provide you valuable insight about your customer’s interests and intentions. Our analytics dashboard displays popular queries returning no results which helps you to fill gaps in your content and can inform your product roadmap (or inventory for ecommerce).

Developer friendly

Swiftype is also developer friendly. Although you can install our site search on your website without writing a line of code, we support a well-documented API as well as client libraries.

Adding a search bar to your site

One it comes time to add a search interface to your website, you can do so using the a JavaScript snippet provided in the Swiftype dashboard or our search and autocomplete jQuery libraries which support highly-customized implementations with features like faceting. Here’s in-depth information on building and implementing a Swiftype search UI.

Site Search Migration in 4 Simple Steps

We’re to help plan and execute a successful migration

Migrating from GSS to Swiftype can be accomplished in 4 simple steps. Here’s a blog post that outlines the process.

If you’re a GSS customer and you’re ready to get started with Swiftype, you can fill out this form, and we will be in touch shortly. Alternatively, you can shoot us an email at success at swiftype.com.

Video Guide

Let our search specialist walk you through migrating from GSS to Swiftype in the step-by-step video guide.

The Olympic mindset

With the Winter Olympics in full swing and over 2,950 athletes representing 92 countries in PyeongChang, we decided to take a look at how many countries around the world are home to Swiftype customers.

Going gold at 17

But before we dive into this, we wanted to give a shout out to Red Gerard, the 17 year old American, who took home gold in men’s snowboarding slopestyle. Incredible…here’s to more excitement over the next two weeks.

Swiftype customers around the world

Ok, now back to the business of search. Swiftype is currently powering search in over 35 countries with customers on every continent but Antartica. The US is home to the greatest number of our customers followed by the UK and Canada.

Swiftype is currently powering search in over 35 countries with customers on every continent but Antartica.

Our customers range from large multinational corporations to governments to small businesses trying to amp up their digital presence. Swiftype has become the trusted site search solution for a wide variety of organizations across the world (including BMW, Lyft, AT&T, and Samsung) and while we’re proud of the success we’ve had, our work is not over. In so many ways, we, along with our parent company Elastic, are just getting started.

Ricera. Busca. Recherche. Suche. Khoj. Zoeken. Search.

Get started with Swiftype Site Search

Level up your site search with Swiftype’s seamless content ingestion, best-in-class relevancy algorithm, and intuitive admin dashboard. Get started with your 14-day free trial.

Back to the basics: websites are for driving sales

As companies doing business online, we design our websites to educate people about our company’s product and turn them into paying customers. While our websites can certainly also serve other purposes, like engaging and upselling existing customers, generating new business is a central focus for most companies.

When it comes to actionable tactics for getting more business from your website, improving conversion rate (aka conversion rate optimization) is at the top of the list. Here are 8 ways to improve your website’s conversion rate, based on learnings here at Swiftype, findings at our friends’ companies, and lessons from the tech industry at large.

1 — A/B testing your CTAs (and testing in general)

Keeping an experimental mindset

A/B testing CTAs is a tried and true tactic for improving website conversion rate. It keeps you in an experimental mindset and helps provide a framework for creating better versions of your website from a conversion rate standpoint. If you’re a little fuzzy on the details of A/B testing, you can read about the basics here.

When you run your A/B tests, make sure you’re only testing one thing at a time so that your test results are actually meaningful (see the “8 Rules of A/B testing”). You should utilize the scientific method for deciding what to test, executing your experiment, and analyzing the findings. I recommend reading this blog post from Joey DeBruin, Feastly’s Head of Growth: “How to Run Your Growth Team Like a Scientist”. Before joining the tech industry, DeBruin worked as a scientific researcher, so he brings and interesting (and extremely rigorous) perspective to experimentation.

A/B testing in practice

An important thing to note about A/B testing is that it only works if your sample size is large enough. Here’s a tool for calculating how many unique website sessions/visits are needed for an A/B test and here’s a tool for calculating A/B test significance.

In this blog post, Kissmetrics notes, “remember to keep testing regularly, since the effectiveness of anything can change over time.” Just because you found that “Try it Now” converted better than “Start Free Trial” for a button CTA 15 months ago, does not mean that it is still the higher converting CTA. More importantly, you should be testing new CTAs against “Try it now”. I like to call it ABT (always be testing).

At Swiftype, we currently use Google Optimize for A/B testing, which lets you run 3 tests at a time for free.

2 — More video, more engagement (plus SEO benefits!)

Video draws people in

There’s a reason that Facebook altered their news feed algo to prioritize video more highly than other forms of content: it’s highly engaging. Although your website is much different than a social media platform like Facebook, people are still people and they’re generally more engaged by video than a chunk of text. People may not take the time to read all the wonderful copy you’ve written to explain your product and instead just gloss over your page. But if you happen to have a nice 1-2 minute video that clearly explains your product, you might grab their attention. Once you have someone’s attention (a very hard thing to get these days), they are significantly more likely to (a) read your wonderful copy, (b) start evaluating your product for purchase, and (c) pay you money.

SEO benefits from video

Another thing worth noting about video is that it can can help with SEO. In general, videos boost time spent on page, which is a factor in the Google search algorithm.

3 — I’d love to chat

Live chat on the Swiftype website

We mentioned live chat in our “Website Checklist: 7 Must-Have Features” and stated that:

“Customers prefer live chat over other communication options (Source: Forbes), and it actually helps companies to build trust with their website visitors.”

At Swiftype, chat has not just been a good idea in theory. It’s actually one of our highest converting channels.

Get more “at bats” with potential customers

Neil Patel references a study in his blog post about live chat that states that live chat can increase online leads by an average of 40% by among other things, helping you to lower the number of website visitors who hit your website but never indicate interest or provide you with their information. Chat is a natural and effective way to communicate with your website visitors and turn them into paying customers. Do keep in mind that you’ll need to have people available to operate the chat, and they will need to know about your products (this is especially important to keep in mind if your product is more technical like the Elastic Stack).

Looking for a live chat software? Check out Olark, Intercom, or Drift.

4 — Site search (because it converts and provides you with actionable data)

Website visitors who utilize your search bar are high intent

Of course, we have to promote our own product, but site search is truly a helpful tool for boosting your website conversion rate. I actually recently answered a Quora question about site search and conversion rate noting that for websites that have a search bar, 30% of their visitors will perform a search. What’s even more interesting is that visitors who perform a search are over 200% more likely to convert than those who don’t. Although the research report which contains these findings (which I found on Kissmetrics) is more focused on ecommerce, it still carries over to other verticals and industries at varying levels of conversion.

Site search is a flexible interface and source of actionable data

At the very least, searchers are high intent and they’re providing you with actionable data such as things that they’re interested in that are not currently on your website (determined by our popular queries with no results metric). Search is a flexible interface for you to serve up the right content for a large range of potential customers. If you implement site search with a powerful backend that returns relevant results and an intuitive UI, chances are that you’ll see a lift in your conversion rate.

Getting started with site search

Ready to get started with Swiftype Site Search? You can sign up for a 14-day free trial here and watch a quick product overview here.

Also don’t miss: “Site search is your marketing website’s killer feature”

5 — When less is more

Giving website visitors more options is not always better (and can be worse)

When we’re building our landing pages, sometimes we get carried away and include too many sections, too many icons, and too many CTAs. We want our website visitors to understand all the intricacies of our products and have options for “learning more” but sometimes we forget that providing more options is not always better.

I’m not saying that short pages are better than long pages (that more depends on your unique business – more on this here), but that your page should be highly focused and drive a given visitor to complete 1 or a few different tasks.

The paradox of choice

Although Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice theory may not hold true in all cases, in general, too much choice can be overwhelming/paralyzing — especially in the case of web pages with limited surface area. Not familiar with the paradox of choice? Watch this TED talk.

6 — The price is right (pricing pages)

Pricing page structure

For SaaS companies, the typical pricing page has columns with pricing tiers, usually ranging from free (sign up now) to enterprise (contact us for pricing/schedule a demo). Since website visitors tend to check out your pricing page before they decide to pay you, the structure of the page is important, to say the least. Let’s take a look at the pricing pages for three SaaS companies/products: Asana, Intercom, and Swiftype.

• Asana — Asana has heavily simplified the header on their pricing page and keeps their header, and website for that matter, simple throughout. Under the “Pricing” h1, Asana has a short paragraph that reminds you (a) what Asana is and (b) why you might want to pay for it rather than use the free version. In the large center column (Premium version), Asana has a purple button with the text “Calculate your price”. If you click this button it prompts you to sign into the app. This is an interesting CTA and Asana is likely using this tactic because they found that this softer CTA actually converts better than something like “Buy Now”.

• Intercom — Intercom’s pricing page has to serve a different purpose than Asana and Swiftype’s pricing pages. Since Intercom now offers three products (Respond, Engage, Educate), they need to provide pricing information on all three products without overwhelming a visitor. I think they do a good job of this, and I’m a fan of their “Recommended solutions” section which shows how you might want to combine their products to solve business problems. It’s a great example of reducing complexity/cognitive load.

• Swiftype — The Swiftype pricing page features three tiers of pricing, with the two lower priced tiers in a single rectangle and then the Enterprise plan in a rectangle by itself. The Pro and Enterprise plan briefly note some of the additional things you’re getting by paying more and if you scroll down you’ll see this detailed comparison chart. One thing that I think we’ve done well with this page is including our SOC 2 compliance badge which promotes trust and reliability.

7 — Navigation structure and recognizing that people do click footer links

Carefully consider the links you include in your navigation bar

Navigation bars are important to a website visitor’s (especially a first time visitor) experience on your website. A clean navigation bar that features links to the things you know your potential customers care about — product pages, pricing, documentation, customer stories, etc. — will lead your website visitor to the promised land. A convoluted nav bar will lead them to your competitor’s website.

I don’t think there’s any one size fits all advice with nav bars other than including links you know are important to educating leads and converting them. You can figure out what those links are by tracking clicks with UTMs and by using heatmap tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg. You can also learn about what on your website converts by conducting surveys and talking to your customers.

People click our footer and they probably click yours too

While only about 19% of visitors to our home page scroll to the footer, those that do are often looking for specific information and they will click on footer links to try and find it. 

More specifically, people click on the “See Pricing →” link in our footer which is a good sign of intent to purchase. In fact, 1.42% of all clicks on our homepage are on this link which is a significant number of clicks based on our visitor and click volume on this page.

In short, don’t neglect your footer as it can be a real source of business. Design your footer with purpose, test what links and text you include, and you could see a lift in your overall conversion rate.

8 — Flaunt that customer validation

Let your customers do the talking

Your customers’ opinions, recommendations, and thoughts about your company are worth significantly more to your buyers than anything that you say about your product.

Logos — If you have customers that are willing to let you use their logo on your website, you should absolutely do it as it helps build trust, especially with bigger companies. In a way, this is a form of show don’t tell in the sense that you’re not saying why you’re awesome but just showing how your awesomeness is currently manifesting itself in the market.

This customer logo banner is from Asana’s pricing page. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Nasa? Either this product provides value or these highly sophisticated companies/organizations like wasting money on useless software.

Customer Quotes — Customer quotes, in a similar manner to case studies, help visitors to get a feel for the problems your product solves from a real end user’s standpoint. Everyone is going to say their own product is great; when there are other businesses saying that a product is worth using, then it just sounds more credible.

Go forth and convert

Focus your energy

Hopefully you were able to get some helpful ideas from this post. While you might be excited to go try all of 8 them, I recommend choosing 1-2 and really focusing in on them. These tactics do work but you might not see the success you should if you spread yourself too thin.

Constant experimentation

Furthermore, it’s possible that you’ve tried some of these tactics and experienced varying levels of success and/or failure with them. As I mentioned in the section about A/B testing, the effectiveness of your conversion strategies will constantly be changing and you should keep testing your current set up as well as experimenting with new ideas.

Free Site Search

When many people think about search, they think about Google, so it’s only natural that Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE) solution is a popular choice for site search installations. Additionally, Google Custom Search is a free product (supported by ads), so it’s an attractive solution for smaller websites and non-commercial use cases.

Replacing Google Site Search

After Google announced that they were sunsetting their paid site search product, Google Site Search (GSS), last year, many businesses began looking for replacements. CSE is an option for these companies, but it has some significant differences from GSS, and it doesn’t provide the robust functionality and flexibility of paid hosted search solutions. Furthermore, companies that implement Custom Search are at risk of showing their competitors ads directly on their website and will have to include Google branding alongside their search installation.

Comparing Google Custom Search Engine and Swiftype

To understand the differences between CSE and Swiftype, let’s dig into some of the features of both solutions. As you evaluate a paid search solution for your business, consider how you can benefit from advanced functionality such as the ability the fine-tune your search relevancy function without writing any code.

1 — Indexing your data

Web crawlers and structured data

Both Swiftype and Google have powerful web crawlers for indexing your website’s data. Additionally, both products enable you to provide structured data to your crawler and exclude/include portions of your website so that your search engine only searches across relevant content.

Confusing Google’s crawler

One key consideration for Custom Search is that if you incorrectly provide structured data, it can affect how your website is indexed for regular Google Search since Google will also be crawling your website to rank it in its Internet-wide search engine. With a paid site search solution like Swiftype, this is much less of a concern. Swiftype enables you to use meta tags and body-embedded data attribute tags to set exactly what content is extracted and indexed from your pages.

Indexing API option

Swiftype also gives you the option of indexing your data via an API. Utilizing the API gives you full control over how your data is indexed and allows you to index content from sources other than web pages like databases. You can learn more about the Swiftype API here.

2 — Search interface design

Results display

Both Swiftype and CSE enable you to customize the look and feel of your search bar and results through your admin dashboard. More specifically, both solutions enable you customize colors and determine whether you want to show search results in an overlay, on another page, or on the page where the search query is executed.

Granular result customization through a dashboard

Swiftype enables you to determine how many search results are shown and easily specify which data fields are displayed in your results.

Support for building your own search interface

Depending on your business and site search use case, you may want to implement a custom search interface with features like filtering and faceting. Swiftype provides their search and autocomplete jQuery libraries so you can fully customize the appearance of search on your site.

3 — Search relevancy customization

Drag-and-drop Result Rankings

Both Swiftype and CSE allow you to customize search results by pinning content to the results for certain queries but Swiftype enables you to do it through a drag-and-drop interface (a patented design). This interface, the Swiftype Result Rankings feature, enables you to easily customize the complete list of a search results for a given query and makes it easy to add or delete results from the list.

Global relevancy customization with Weights

Swiftype enables you to fine-tune your search relevancy algorithm with sliders. With the Swiftype Weights feature, you can boost the importance of certain data fields and then immediately test your changes inside of the admin dashboard. If you like the changes, you can click a button to make your new search algorithm go live. Alternatively, you can click a button to restore default weights.

4 — Analytics

Basic analytics dashboard

Site search is an excellent source of actionable data that helps you to better understand your customers’ interests and intentions. CSE has a very basic analytics dashboard that provides you with some metrics like volume of queries and popular queries. For more in-depth analytics, “you can get enhanced reporting through Google Analytics site search reporting” according to a note in the Google Custom Search dashboard. 

Leveraging search analytics

Swiftype’s robust analytics dashboard provides charts for viewing total search volume for your desired date range and makes it easy for you to export your data. Swiftype’s dashboard also shows you most popular queries, popular queries that are returning no results, and CTRs on search results. Swiftype customers often use their site search data to drive their content strategy and make decision about product inventory.

Swiftype + Google Analytics

If you’d like, you can also connect Swiftype to your Google Analytics account so that your site search data is available in that platform. You can learn more about connecting Swiftype with Google Analytics here.

5 — Ads

Google search on your website, ads and all

As mentioned earlier, Google Custom Search is an ad-supported product. If you haven’t used a CSE installation, Google displays ads on top of the organic search results just like it does for its Internet-wide search engine.

Questionable user experience and competitors’ ads

Ads above your search results can make for a poor user experience, because your website visitors may not see results from your actual website without scrolling down (see image below for example). Unfortunately, your website visitor might not scroll down at all and instead click on one of the ads…which could be a competitor’s ad.

6 — Support

Free means no support

Sometimes things go wrong when you’re implementing a new solution, and it’s nice to have support on hand when they do. Since Google Custom Search is free, it does not have support so you’re own your own if something goes wrong.

Support and consultation to ensure success

With Swiftype, you have access to our support engineers through email and if you have an enterprise plan, you get access to phone support. Additionally, Swiftype and our partners can help you to get up and running with our site search solution — ensuring that you and your customers capture the full value of our product.

Getting started with Swiftype

Get a feel for Swiftype with a free trial

We love telling people about Swiftype’s reliable indexing, relevancy customization features, and robust analytics but don’t take our word for it. Try out Swiftype with our 14-day free trial.

Get in touch

Prefer to speak with a search specialist directly? Fill out this form and we’ll be in touch!

 

High-intent website visitors use site search

About 30% of your website visitors will perform an on-site search, and it’s a strong sign of intent when they do. Website visitors who perform a search are telling you they’re interested in your company or product and what’s great is that you know exactly what they’re interested in. Search data is valuable insight that helps you to understand your customers, identify trends as they develop, and optimize your website content with confidence.

The road to better search

Although some companies treat site search as an afterthought, it’s actually a powerful revenue lever and source of unique insight that you might not get anywhere else. When evaluating search solutions for your website, it’s important to consider that products can vary widely depending on their underlying architecture, algorithms, user interface, and analytics dashboard among other key factors. Getting more out of your search bar is definitely possible if you follow best practices for ingesting your website’s content, implementing your search UI, and optimizing your search overtime.

Years of learning in the site search market

Search bars are our thing

Here at Swiftype, we’re the trusted search provider of Fortune 500s, governments (like The City of Portland), high-growth startups (like Mapbox), small businesses, and universities of all sizes — helping them to implement and continually optimize solutions that meet their business needs. When companies decide to evaluate Swiftype for their search projects, they’re frequently swayed by our ease of implementation, intuitive admin dashboard, and fully customizable search interfaces.

Hosted search built on the world’s most popular search technology

A big thing that companies appreciate about Swiftype is that we are owned by Elastic so our product is officially supported by the makers of the Elastic (aka ELK) Stack, an open source technology that has more than 150 million downloads worldwide. Elasticsearch, a component of the Elastic Stack, is the go-to search technology for companies like Dell, Yelp, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Verizon, and Instacart. Swiftype is a hosted search solution built on the Elastic Stack. By architecting our search product on Elastic’s robust infrastructure, we’ve been able to make world-class search technology easily and immediately accessible to businesses and teams of all sizes and technical competency.

Webinars: Product Demo and GSS Migration

You’re invited!

Whether you’re looking to migrate from GSS, add search for the first time or improve your exisiting implementation, we encourge you to attend a webinar to learn more about how Swiftype can help. 

SaaS Site Search Product Demo Introduction

Date: Wednesday, Jan 24, 2018

Time: 10:00AM PT / 1:00PM ET

Duration: 1 hour

Register here: http://bit.ly/2Dlqp4K

 

Migrate from GSS to Swiftype Site Search in 4 Easy Steps

Date: Thursday, Feb 1, 2018

Time: 10:00AM PT / 1:00PM ET

Duration: 1 hour

Register here: http://bit.ly/2mtbNcn

Let us know if we can help

We’re looking forward to seeing you at one (or both!) of our upcoming webinars. In the meantime, if you have questions or just want to learn more email us at success @ swiftype.com or head over to our website.

Putting GSS to rest

For all you Google aficionados out there this may be tough to do, but it’s time to say goodbye to Google Site Search (GSS). On April 1st, the product will officially be shut down joining the likes of other sunsetted Google products including Google Wave, Knol, Google Reader, and Google Search Appliance (GSA).

Google Site Search made it really easy to add a search bar to your website — abstracting away the difficulties of building a search engine and making implementation as easy as dropping a few lines of code into your source files. Considering that Google performs search across the entire web in milliseconds, businesses knew they could rely on Google for their search needs. But now, whether they like it or not, companies have to find a new search provider. So where should they start?

The site search world keeps turning

Here at Swiftype (an Elastic company), we’ve become very familiar with a company’s process of evaluating a GSS replacement and eventually migrating to a new provider. Over the years, we’ve established ourselves as the trusted search provider for 1000s of companies, and now we’re helping longtime GSS customers (like the City of Portland) successfully replace their site search solutions. Without further ado, here are 5 key considerations for implementing an adequate Google Site Search Replacement.

5 key considerations for implementing an adequate Google Site Search Replacement

1 — Content Ingestion

How does the search solution index your data? Most search solutions will have a web crawler and API for indexing data but there can be wide variety in the performance of these options from solution to solution. A few things to consider around content ingestion via web crawler is whether you can customize what data the web crawler indexes, how quickly it indexes your data, and how often the ingestion engine reindexes your data (especially if your website is frequently updated). If you’re going the API route, be sure the company provides tutorials and robust documentation.

2 — Ease of Implementation

How easy is it to get up and running? Even if you have technical talent to help you implement your search engine, you probably don’t want to spend tons of time on the project. Try to find a solution that works well right out-of-the-box but also allows for customization with search relevancy and interface design. Considering that 30% of your website visitors will perform an on-site search, a quick implementation will enable you to start providing value to your customers sooner and help your business to start/continue recognizing the revenue that high-quality site search drives.

3 — Scalability

If you’re a rapidly growing or already large business, then a big question you should ask about a search solution is, “does it scale?” Building great hosted search requires special architecture and significant technical expertise, so you’ll want to be sure your search provider has experience providing search at scale. For example, the Swiftype search architecture is built on the Elastic Stack which enables us to support over 10,000 production search engines and serve over 5 billion queries a month (learn more about our infrastructure here). Even if you have a smaller use case, you’ll still want to go with a battle-tested search provider to ensure a positive end-user experience for your customers.

4 — Search Analytics

One of the best things about implementing site search is that it provides valuable data about your website visitors’ interests and intentions. When you’re evaluating search solutions, get a feel for the built-in analytics that vendors provide and lean towards a solution that offers robust analytics so that you get the full value of a site search implementation. Aside from showing you what’s popular on your website, search analytics also help you to identify holes in your content by surfacing high volume queries that are currently returning no results.

5 — Customer Support

While we would all prefer for implementations and updates to go perfectly smoothly, sometimes things go wrong. When they do, it’s nice to have a responsive customer support team to help you iron things out and get back on track. After all, while hosted search solutions remove a lot of the difficulty of implementing search, it’s still a relatively complicated technology and there should be experts on hand to answer your questions.

At your service: Swiftype GSS Migration Specialists

Dedicated team to help you migrate

If you’re a current GSS customer, our GSS Migration Specialists can help you successfully migrate over to Swiftype Site Search. As mentioned before, our team has lots of experience with the GSS migration process (which is really simple) and will get you get up and running quickly.

Get in touch

If you have questions about migrating from GSS to Swiftype or just about site search implementations in general, feel free to email us at success at swiftype.com. Alternatively, if you’re a GSS customer and you’re ready to get started with Swiftype, you can fill out this form, and we will be in touch shortly.

The following is a Q&A with Mapbox’s Rafa Gutierrez about his experience working with Swiftype Site Search.

About Mapbox

If you’re not already familiar with Mapbox, they are a location data platform for mobile and web applications. They provide building blocks for developers to add location features like maps, search, and navigation into any experience they create. Mapbox’s strong customer portfolio includes The Weather Channel, Tableau, General Electric, and National Geographic. Together, Mapbox’s customers are shaping the way 300 million people explore the world.

Mapbox + Swiftype

Mapbox has been a Swiftype customer for a number of years now, and they use our search technology in a few different places on their website. Mapbox’s core use case for Swiftype is in their help center where they leverage our search technology to give their customers easy access to the documentation that’s relevant to their needs.

Recently, we spoke with Rafa Gutierrez, a Support Engineer at Mapbox, about his experience with Swiftype. During our conversation, Rafa touched on his use of Swiftype’s customizable web crawler, powerful search analytics and synonyms feature. Here’s our full conversation.

Question and Answer with Mapbox’s Rafa Gutierrez

Q: How does Swiftype compare to your previous search solution? What benefits have you experienced since implementing Swiftype?

A: Before we started using Swiftype, we had to build in specific page filtering for each API documentation page. This was cumbersome and we knew it wouldn’t scale for additional SDKs and other frameworks that we’d eventually have come online. We also needed a way for the search to cover the entirety of our site while still having some selective control over what it crawled. With Swiftype, we could just add a code snippet to all the areas of our site we needed covered by search.

We use Swiftype throughout the site but its main customization has been for our help and support pages. Swiftype crawls our pages selectively for content and pulls various categories and tags for filtering. We’re able to blacklist portions of our site to keep things relevant. We also have the ability to tailor content to the specific user and weigh out specific terms to differentiate content on similar searches.

Q: Tell us about the types of users that visit your website regularly.  What are they looking for? How are you creating experiences that are tailored to their unique needs?

A: We’re a developer platform and our customers range from government organizations to autonomous vehicle manufacturers to on-demand transportation companies. Whether it’s finding a coffee spot on Foursquare or building navigation systems for autonomous cars – Mapbox does the geo stuff so developers can focus on building their product.

As we look to meet the needs of our wide array of users, we want ensure a streamlined and tailored experience that gives users fast access to relevant documentation so they can make the most of their use of Mapbox technology. Swiftype helps us deliver relevant content so our customers can find what they’re looking for faster.

 

Swiftype helps us deliver relevant content so our customers can find what they’re looking for faster.

Rafa Gutierrez
Support Engineer

 

Q: In what ways have you utilized the data from the Swiftype Search Analytics dashboard? What is your search data telling you about how users engage with your help center and product?

A: We dive into our metrics dashboard regularly to look for oddities or patterns that give us insight to how customers are finding the info they need. When customers search for terms that we’re not listing in our glossary or used for keywords in our categories, we can find these and add them to synonyms. For instance, we found a number of customers that would search for the phrase “add marker to map”. There are a few ways to do this with our tools so we restructured our docs to surface ones relevant to getting started with creating markers on a map. We also added synonyms to Swiftype to capture words that often get conflated with markers on a map like “pins” or “points”.

 

Q: How are you using the combination of search and quick glance features to drive down customer service requests?

A: We use Jekyll for a static HTML site generator so we can load up all relevant keywords, categories, and excerpts as metadata for our all of our help docs. By doing this, our search can pull this info into the quick glance as customers type in their search terms. At glance, they can see which category their term falls into and read brief excerpts before they click through. This was really valuable for us in that we could apply design treatments to results and watch search results get clicked through more than 50% of the time, reduced our searches with no clickthroughs by 16%, and nearly eliminated results with multiple clicks.

We also used the search in our contact form to provide an extra layer of assistance to ensure our customers didn’t overlook a doc before contacting us. We’re continuing to iterate on this approach for our next release.

Note: This blog post is a summary of the Swiftype’s Technical Journey with Elasticsearch Webinar. You can view it here.

Hosted search built on the Elastic Stack

Swiftype is a search as a service solution built on the Elastic Stack. It abstracts away many of the difficulties of architecting a search engine and provides powerful out-of-the-box functionality. To make it easy to get search up and running, Swiftype provides a web crawler and API for ingesting data, an admin dashboard for managing your search experience, and multiple options for implementing your search UI including a JavaScript snippet as well as search and autocomplete jQuery libraries.

How Swiftype leverages the Elastic Stack

Building a hosted search solution that delivers relevant results for a large amount of varied data is difficult. Building a hosted search solution that allows for a wide-range of result customizations and relevancy tuning is even more of a challenge. Elasticsearch provided a strong backbone for us to build a robust and scalable search solution that works well for many use cases including ecommerce, customer support, marketing websites, digital publishing, mobile, and more.

Here’s how Swiftype leverages the Elastic Stack for scalability, quality of service, search functionality, and search analytics.

Scalability

To touch a little more on the scale of Swiftype, we currently support over 10,000 production search engines, have over 1 billion documents stored in Elasticsearch clusters, and serve over 5 billion queries a month. We have customers ranging from Fortune 500s to high-growth startups from large government organizations to small colleges that trust our search solution everyday.

No doubt, Elasticsearch has been absolutely critical to our ability to scale and its distributed design gave us a leg up in effectively managing large amounts of data. From a scalability and reliability standpoint, we can rest easy knowing that our underlying architecture is sound and will continue to support our growing business for years to come.

Quality of service

We’re constantly making improvements to our product and relevancy algorithm, and occasionally we will make some significant changes. When we do make large changes, Elasticsearch enables us to migrate our customers to updated search engines without taking them offline.

We have a few different ways of managing our Elasticsearch clusters depending on the needs of our customers, such as query load. In some cases, we have multiple customers on a single cluster, while in other cases we have a single customer on a single cluster. Furthermore, the distributed nature of Elasticsearch allows us to put our larger customers on multiple clusters to parallelize operations and provide high availability in the case of server failure.

Search functionality

Diving more into search functionality, Elasticsearch enables us to provide autocomplete, spelling correction, and typo-tolerance to our customers right out-of-the-box. We abstract the coding of these features away from the user and give them full control over their search engine’s relevancy algorithm. When you create a Swiftype search engine, it automatically returns relevant results, but you can also customize your search results according to your needs.

On a query-by-query basis, you can add to, remove from, and fully reorder search results through a drag-and-drop interface. You can also adjust the weights placed on your data fields and create synonyms which are groups of terms that are treated equally for the purposes of search (car = vehicle). Again, while no coding is required to fine-tune your search engine, we also expose these capabilities through the Swiftype API.

When you make changes to your Swiftype search engine, you can immediately preview your changes in the admin dashboard before pushing them live. For features like weighting, it’s a good idea to review how relevancy updates will affect search results before deploying them to production. Since our search solution is built on Elasticsearch, we can instantly update the relevancy algorithm powering your search engine — enabling you to see the effects of your changes in real-time and determine whether you want to keep them or restore your settings.

Search analytics

Aside from the robust search functionality we offer, the Elastic Stack has also enabled us to provide in-depth search analytics. In the Swiftype admin dashboard, we include metrics like volume of search queries, popular queries, queries returning no results, and CTRs on search results. This data has proved very valuable to our customers as they use it to better understand their website visitors, shape their content strategy, and optimize their relevancy algorithms.

The Elastic Stack: From a bet to best practice

We were an early adopter of Elasticsearch, first utilizing the technology when it was on version 0.19. Back in 2012, we made a bet on the Elasticsearch technology and community and that decision has turned out to be the right one. Over the past few years, the Elasticsearch open source community has grown tremendously and the project has gained tons of momentum. As of today, the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, and Kibana) has been downloaded over 150 million times worldwide. Today, building search engines, logging systems, or business analytics dashboards with the Elastic Stack is far from a bet; it has become best practice.

You can say 2017 was an eventful year for Swiftype. From starting the year with a product launch of Swiftype Enterprise Search, to helping countless customers migrate from their discontinued Google Site Search solutions, to joining forces with Elastic, the makers of popular open source products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. To celebrate the new year, here’s a look back at the top blog posts of 2017.

1 — Swiftype Joins Forces with Elastic

“We are thrilled today to announce that Swiftype is joining forces with Elastic, the makers of Elasticsearch. This new alliance will accelerate the development of new features and tools that will make it easier for you to manage and deploy world-class search functionality to your website or organization.”

We’ve built some great search products at Swiftype over the past 5 years, but honestly, we are just getting started. Joining forces with Elastic enables us to partner with the best search experts in the world, so we can continue to innovate and deliver an increasingly diverse suite of powerful search solutions.

2 – Google Site Search is Sunsetting: What to Expect and How to Move On

“By now you’ve probably heard that Google plans to sunset Google Site Search (GSS) and direct existing customers to use their free replacement, the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Unfortunately for these customers, the CSE forces websites to show ads alongside their search results, so the transition isn’t as simple as it may seem. As the dominant alternative to GSS for the past 4 years, we at Swiftype are very familiar with the migration process, and we’re happy to share some of our advice to those weighing their options.”

In early 2017, Google announced it was sunsetting their widely used Site Search product. Since Swiftype Site Search is similar to GSS in its ease of use and out-of-the-box relevancy, many former Google customers turned to us for their website search needs.

3 — Customers Say It Best

“Each month, nearly 900,000 buyers utilize G2 Crowd for unbiased user reviews to assess which products are best for their businesses. Swiftype’s reviews on G2 Crowd both reaffirm the value of our product to our customers, and allow us to improve our products to make sure each and every user is satisfied with their site search.”

When potential Swiftype customers are evaluating our solution, we really encourage them to do a free trial and spend some time using our product. We believe in our product and consistent positive product reviews from our customers help to reaffirm that belief.

4 — Introducing AI-Powered Enterprise Search

“Today, we’re excited to announce a new product that addresses this problem head-on: Swiftype Enterprise Search. By integrating artificial intelligence with our industry leading search technology, Swiftype Enterprise Search is a powerful new way for employees to seamlessly access the data they need, from any device, across the many applications their jobs require.”

Earlier this year, we launched Swiftype Enterprise Search  — a modern, AI-powered search solution that enables companies to unify content from all of their apps and data stores. Our enterprise search solution is available on web, desktop and mobile and integrates with your existing workflows so you can find the files you need without breaking your concentration.

5 — 10 Examples of Well-Designed Search UIs

“Are you implementing search and looking for some inspiration? In general, intuitive search UI designs are easy to access, match the look and feel of the overall website, and offer autocomplete results and filters when appropriate. To give you a better idea, here are 10 examples of well-designed search UIs.”

At Swiftype, we’ve helped thousands of businesses to index their content, customize their search engines and then implement search interfaces on their website, either with our JavaScript snippet or our search and autocomplete jQuery libraries. Over the years, we’ve learned what makes for a good search experience and can confidently tell you that these 10 companies have nailed their search UIs — helping them to get the full value of their search technology and enabling their customers to easily find what they need.

6 — How Asana, Twilio, and SurveyMonkey optimized their customer support centers [Infographic]

“Asana, Twilio, and SurveyMonkey have all invested heavily in creating high-quality support content. To ensure this content is easily accessible, these companies leverage advanced search technology that provides relevant results to their customers and actionable analytics for them.”

One big use case for our search technology is in customer support centers. Companies like those listed above utilize Swiftype Search as a flexible portal for their customers to access their support documentation. Since search is a natural way for people to access a wide array of support content, our customers have been very successful in reducing their manual support loads while simultaneously helping their customers to resolve their issues more quickly.

7  — How site search makes higher education websites more accessible

“When a website visitor elects to use the search bar on your website, they have a specific goal in mind, so it’s important to provide them with relevant search results. At Swiftype, we specialize in building relevant site search technology and making it incredibly easy to set up on your website. We’re fortunate to be able to work with some great universities, and we wanted to highlight their Swiftype success stories.”

University websites generally have lots of pages designed to cater to a diverse constituency of prospective students, current students, faculty, staff and parents. Powerful search technology like Swiftype helps higher education institutions to improve the accessibility of their websites so that their site visitors can find the content that’s relevant to them.

8 — Great Developers Ship, They Don’t Configure Search

“Engineers and developers want to spend more time developing products and websites, not configuring search. It’s pretty obvious, and understandable. Developing allows them to be creative, solve problems, and build new things. Search, albeit a critical feature for site visitors, is part of a site’s foundation. It should already be there. And it should work, and work well.”

As you can imagine, we love to build search products at Swiftype and can tell you that they’re difficult to get right. When you’re working on a product or website and need search functionality, you may not have the time or resources to allocate towards building search. And that’s where we come in with our robust search as a service solution and well-documented developer APIs.

9 — Welcome to the Swiftype office in San Francisco [HQ Photo Tour]

“Welcome to Swiftype Headquarters in San Francisco, California. Founders Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie have created a comfortable and fun office environment with an open floor plan, scattered lounges, and various collaborative areas. Take a look at our office photos below to experience a day in the life of a Swiftype team member.”

Take a tour of the Swiftype/Elastic San Francisco Office and get a feel for what it’s like to work at a high-growth startup.

10 — Swiftype API overview: Customize your search engine

“The Swiftype API gives you full control over the schema of your search engine and the content that you index. With the Swiftype API endpoints, you are able to index data, execute search queries, and access rich analytics.”

One of our main focuses for the Swiftype Site Search product is to make it extremely easy to get your data indexed so you can quickly install a working search bar. Some of our customers prefer to interact with Swiftype through our API or client libraries which enables them to build search to their exact specifications, from the data ingestion process to user interface design.

Test drive Swiftype Site Search

At Swiftype, we provide powerful search as a service complete with customizable search UIs. We make it easy for you to get a search engine up and running by providing a web crawler and API for ingesting data, and an intuitive admin dashboard for managing your search experience. Ready to get started with Swiftype? Sign up for your 14-day free trial here.